…h-carbon blades. The whetstones are waterstones, which means you have to moisten them with water (how depends on manufacturer’s instructions, the ones we had had to be completely immersed), and then keep wetting them to make sure your knife doesn’t bite into them (the coarser your stone, the more often you have to sprinkle water on top of it). You also have to semi-hemi regularly flatten them (he did this with a diamond stone in the shop, but advi…

…So… I’ve been sitting on this for a while and was told there was actually no problem in announcing it! Pleased to announce that The House of Shattered Wings will be published in French by Fleuve Editions, with a translation by Emmanuel Chastellière. More info when I have it. (and I’ll go back to feeling unaccountably nervous about it. There’s something very different to selling a book in your home country, eep)…

…en-Silverstein). To whet your appetite, here are a few of the glyphs Jonathon designed for the cover of Servant of the Underworld……

…follow these norms, you’re weird. That you’re other, alien, forever not welcome, your society used as inspiration to showcase the odd and fictional things people get around to on other planets, in other imagined pasts (with the attendant niggling feeling that you’ll be fine as long as you remain cool and fictional, as opposed to here, close, in your face, every day). And I know genre isn’t like that–that, at its best, it shows us wonderful and new…

…g. The French Imaginales Awards used to have a Plastic Puss-in-Boots trophy, which is kind of kitsch and cool (don’t know if it’s still the case because I haven’t gone in a number of years). Just saying 🙂 (comments closed, sorry, because I just have no time and very little in the way of energy)….

…ery grateful. However, we now need to ask for your patience. We are aware that GoFundMe recently took down the campaign sometime during October 28 and we are doing all we can to gather the reason and to get the campaign up and running again. Please do not worry, as we still have access to the funds and have records of the donors. We will keep the updates coming as we learn more. Again, thank you all very much for the outpouring of love and support…

…s this weekend and Eschacon in Amsterdam Nov 5-7. Come say hi if you’re around, I’ll be quite happy to chat and sign stuff. As Zen says , Eschacon is now associated with a great deal of sadness, as writer Rochita Loenen-Ruiz has lost her husband and the father of her children last week. The fundraiser we set up to help her through this time of need is still ongoing–we have got a lot of cool rewards and are aiming for stretch goals (which include t…

…ould really use some financial help. We’ve set up a fundraiser here: And, hum, I know people have been asking about hard-to-obtain Xuya stories? If you donate to this, you’ll have access to an exclusive ebook which features three Xuya stories which aren’t online: namely, “Fleeing Tezcatlipoca”, “Two Sisters in Exile”, and “Memorials”. (Apologies for the generic cover, I put that together in ~1h yesterday evening. I can guarantee you that the text…

…Game of Fives in Kate Elliott’s Court of Fives, crucial to navigating the underground of the city, has been deliberately obscured by the rulers of the country). Myth and history take on a literal, pressing meaning–it can kill you if you don’t work it out in time. Knowledge of the past is also a source of power, particularly in post-apocalyptic narratives (Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s Canticle for Leibowitz, Rosemary Kirstein’s Steerswoman, Zelazny’s L…

…e UK (London/Manchester) this weekend, for the Gollancz Festival. My full schedule (and the face-to-face schedule of all events) is here: note that both Manchester on Friday and London on Saturday have sold out, but there are still spots for the Sunday event. Though sadly I can’t do the mass signing on Sunday, as I have to get home. There’s also an online event if you can’t make it to any of these: the schedule is below (and yeah, some of us will…